Scripting News

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:19:07 GMT

I have the motto for the Biden campaign: Old enough to know better. Uncle Joe, sit down with a reporter you can relate to, and explain what aging is about. How there's good and bad that come with getting on, and Repubs (of course) have been focusing on the bad but the journalists aren't getting the other side. One thing is for sure, it's hard to put one over on someone who's been in politics at the highest level for as long as President Joe has been. That's what the "know better" part is about. Whatever you can say about him, he knows a lot about being president. I've been using this motto as my own tagline for a while. But in the interest of protecting our democracy, I think the president should use it for his re-election campaign. No charge. 😄

Another Beatles post

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 13:58:18 GMT

Even though they are, for me, the biggest band ever, I've never been able to see the connection to the John Lennon of the early Beatles, and the long-haired bespectacled wild John Lennon that came later. I don't see them as the same person. Not the other Beatles, they all make sense to me. Sometimes they have longer hair or a beard or whatever, but it's still the same face as before. Also I have trouble figuring out which Beatle is singing sometimes. On some songs it's perfectly obvious, others I have no clue. For example Norwegian Wood, Come Together, Strawberry Fields and Lucy in the Sky, that's John of course. Right? Hey Jude, that's clearly Paul, as is Let it Be, Yesterday. But for years I didn't know who sang Lady Madonna. Martha My Dear? Paul could sing so many different kinds of music. John, not so much. I guess. I'm still pretty unsure.

ChatGPT designed a civilization

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 19:12:11 GMT

What I asked for: Imagine a version of The Sims or SimCity that had ChatGPT integrated,. You could create whole civilizations and then explore them, and if there was something you didn't like, you could have your way. No rule of law for you! You are the law. I wonder if you could draw me a Sims-like community as ChatGPT would design it.

"Here's a visual representation of a vibrant, utopian community as imagined with the integration of ChatGPT's design principles. This community blends futuristic architecture harmoniously with nature, featuring energy-efficient homes, community centers, and public spaces all connected by pedestrian pathways and lush gardens. Solar panels and wind turbines integrate seamlessly into the buildings, and the central plaza acts as a hub for gatherings, surrounded by parks, sports fields, and a lake for water activities. This illustration embodies an ideal balance between technology and nature, promoting health, well-being, and environmental stewardship."

I don't care if you're at a BigCo

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:12:40 GMT

I don't care if you work at a big company or are an individual developer.

I care if you can make a contribution toward interop on the open web.

I've found over the years that sometimes devs at bigco's can help enormously (eg microsoft, netscape, automattic) but more often they are harmful (apple, ibm, sun, google stand out as the worst). Sometimes companies play both roles (apple).

But i also know that bigco's because they are big, have lots of different ideas how the world should work. And that can help.

Twitter's big competitive advantage

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 15:11:30 GMT

I wrote this on Twitter this morning. Re-posted here with minimal editing. The fact that I could write it on Twitter was the point.

Twitter has one advantage over all the other social webs. no character limit.

I started typing a post on Threads which has a large character limit compared to the others, but ran out of space and decided to write it over here in twitter instead.

yes they charge me $8 a month for it, but it's worth it.

we have to get used to the idea of paying for value, it's how we avoid the messes of the last 20 years. esp if we can make sure we retain copies of everything we write (guaranteed by using our own writing tools, btw) which is another requirement for the new blogosphere.

btw, i'm having a blast these days. it's like tinkerbell in peter pan. all the open web needed was people to believe it exists for it to come (back) into existence.

still diggin.

ps: i also like they have simple styling, but where are the freaking links, twitter. do I have to pay another $8 to get those??

pps: the worst character limit is bluesky, i can't write anything there. too bad, it's a really nice system otherwise.

ppps: it would be nice to give something like this a title so you don't have to read pgf after pgf to try to figure out where i'm going and if you're interested. so i gave it a title, using markdown syntax. maybe they could just support markdown. hmmm.

pppps: i asked chatgpt to draw an illustration. that light in the middle of the room is the open social web. it's a vision of self-reliance, empowerment and cooperation. I asked for the light to be tinkerbell, but i guess they were concerned the image might belong to someone. creeping shitification.

This is not a picture of Tinkerbell.

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 03:03:28 GMT

Today's song: "Old enough to know better."

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 03:05:39 GMT

Threads is like a new airport, like Denver's airport was a few years ago, and Twitter feels like the old LaGuardia. Not sure what Mastodon feels like. I'll have to think about that. Maybe the airport in New Orleans which is called Armstrong Field now, IIRC. It used to be called MSY and it still is actually, even though the name changed. Power of standards.

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 14:15:13 GMT

Consider this quote from a WP article about a court ruling on abortion in Alabama. “Women who actually know what happened, feel under attack and almost powerless.” When historians look back on this election, they will be amazed that all the attention wasn't focused on reproductive rights, esp when 1. It mattered so much to virtually every American, in very real non-abstract ways, and 2. There was such a dramatic difference between the two parties and candidates on this issue. I think I understand why journalism can't get there. Because they would have to turn the agenda over to the people, and give up a power they have and enjoy, even if that power has repeatedly sent us wildly in the wrong direction, focusing on things that don't matter as much as the gut-wrenching decision Americans have to make this year. Do we want to let Republicans enslave women, 1/2 half the populace, or do we want to return to the way things were before Dobbs. I don't have to explain. Very few people on the fence here. What we need are people directly affected by this situation, women of childbearing age, and let them speak, over and over, every day, about all the ways their lives are turned upside down by the direction the Repubs are taking us. No longer trying to take us. There isn't much to argue about here, it's fairly black and white and it is a real division, not one of the bullshit devisions the Repubs have been able to trick the journalists to focus on.

Are there any gutsy NYT op-ed columnists?

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 02:42:11 GMT

Certainly one of the NYT columnists must have noticed that the management is playing a dangerous game with our election.

When are they going to write a column raising the question of how non-transparent the process is, and how dangerous it has become.

Might take a bit of courage to do that, and being willing to put your career on the line, for all of us.

Just asking the question, even if they fired you, seems as big an issue as the question raised by the special prosecutor re Biden's age?

I've been a columnist for a somewhat major publication myself, and I promise you, if I were witnessing what's going on at the NYT, I'd submit the column, and if they didn't run it, I'd offer it to their competitors, and if they wouldn't take it, I'd run it publicly on a blog, and say that they wouldn't run it.

You can't really witness something like this without speaking up. They gave you the platform, you should use it.

Feed cleaning

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 22:46:20 GMT

I'm doing a feed cleanup, unsubbing from broken feeds, and ones that haven't updated since last summer.

There are some people and orgs whose feeds no longer update who I miss. I'm going to call them out here. If your name appears here that means at least one person misses your blogging. Do with that as you may. However if you start blogging, I would be very upset if you didn't let me know the URL of your site or feed.

David Weinberger
Douglas Rushkoff
Eli Pariser
Farhad Manjoo
Fivethirtyeight
Fred Wilson
Heather Cox Richardson (podcast, she may no longer have one)
Jeff Jarvis
Joel Spolsky
Mother Jones podcast

NYT sports feeds all appear to be gone, I think this is probably because they've stopped covering sports?

NYT > Sports > College Basketball
NYT > Sports > College Football
NYT > Sports > Tennis

Blogs I subscribed to for sentimental reasons

One of my RSS test feeds from 2001.

Existential questions

Does openrss.org have a feed? It seems like it should. :-)

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 18:38:55 GMT

Journalists like everyone in America should pray President Biden stays healthy, because our only alternative is Putin. And btw in Russia, the non-government-owned news people had to leave, to go into exile. The journalists are playing with fire not just for us, but for themselves too. It's not ridiculous to ring the bells really loud about this because we've already lived through this nightmare once.

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 13:30:56 GMT

Surely there must be people inside the NYT that find this as exhausting as we do. How can we set up a receptacle for leaks from inside the NYT and WP so we can get the truth about who's selling us out to Trump and Putin inside those supposedly great public-serving news orgs?

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:27:29 GMT

I don't like Twitter/X -- it's stupid, it already had a perfectly good name. It is what it is. I use Twitter, I don't imagine stopping, certainly not as some kind of demonstration. But it isn't X or Twitter/X. It's just stupid old fucked up Twitter, only now it's fucked for a different reason. I might go for Twitter/F as in Twitter is Fucked thank you very much. And have a nice day. 😄

Ski boot sizing

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 15:29:34 GMT

One thing that's great about ChatGPT is they can help you make a decision in an area you lack expertise and where there is no human you can ask for help making the decision. It's making this human smarter, and it's hard to see the downside of that.

Here's an example. I'm trying to decide whether I should get size 11 rental ski boots or size 11.5. The person behind the counter at the rental place isn't capable of having a long conversation about this, where I get to ask two follow-up questions.

Instead they would say sorry, what size did you say you wanted sir?

The kid isn't thinking about the old dude. 😄

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 17:16:59 GMT

I've had a recent change of direction. Now I'm factoring into my thinking and planning that there will be a rebirth in blogging, because I see there are people willing to work on making the systems work together in new interesting ways. That's what it's going to take -- we have to capture the imaginations of the smartest web writers. And the only thing that's going to get their attention is developers working together to create new experiences for everyone. Now I believe it's going to happen.

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 14:50:33 GMT

Random thought -- maybe the fastest way to get full ActivityPub support for WordPress is to offer a feature in any WP site to cross-post to a Mastodon gateway operated by Automattic. It's possible I don't understand the problem of course. But Mastodon is open source, so it's not like depending on another vendor to do this for you. And then you avoid all the hassles with having to say what part of the protocol is ActivityPub and what part is Mastodon's API.

Eagle on a tree

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 18:18:54 GMT

This eagle was perched on a tree near my house.

I look forward to dumping Trump again

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 14:06:17 GMT

I've mostly kept Trump off the home page of this blog since he left office in 2021, but things are changing, and this is shaping up as a Trump year. I read today in the NYT that the resistance is exhausted. Bullshit. We're very well rested. Anyway I look forward to once again, pretending Trump doesn't exist, next year or the year after, Murphy-willing.

The other day when I was skiing at Belleayre, I got to ride up on a chairlift with a Trump supporter. He told me he got Covid but it wasn't a big deal, just like a cold. I said a lot of people died from Covid. He said most were already sick or overweight. I said yeah but they deserve to live too. He said he didn't get vaccinated, he doesn't like to put drugs in his body. What bullshit I muttered under my breath. I looked at him, maybe ten years younger than me. From New Jersey, a house painter. I said that my life has been saved by drugs at least twice, once when I was perfectly healthy other than having a ruptured appendix at 9 years old. I also said you're really lucky not to have needed medical care, but before you die I bet you will. And I thought to myself but didn't say out loud that what about your parents and grandparents, siblings even children? Have they all been perfectly healthy until they died? Anyway a chairlift is not a safe place for real anger, but -- you also can't walk away from the other person. There's a lot of soul-sharing on rides like that.

What Trump means by making America great.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 19:43:38 GMT

I'm trying out using various social networks to start threads. Still going to use GitHub for serious stuff, but the last few days, some of my posts on Mastodon and Twitter have gotten unexpected interest. Not sure what to attribute it to, some people have theories, but why not just go with the flow.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 19:44:48 GMT

Threads: "Blogrolls may have seemed silly to outsiders, even to the bloggers of the day, but they were the first step after basic writing on the web (blogs) that led to the social web we're using on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky or Facebook. The blogroll says 'these are the sites and people I follow.'"

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 19:39:00 GMT

I'm looking for an example of a WordPress site that has a block-oriented blogroll on it.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:19:04 GMT

Any billionaire could probably buy Trump now for $500 million, and thus put a bet down on the 2024 election. It could probably payoff 100-to-1 easy.

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:16:16 GMT

ChatGPT has been down for me for the last couple of hours. I am really dependent on this thing.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 15:12:36 GMT

Hope you like blogrolls, I'm focusing on them for a while. 😄

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:34:11 GMT

Yesterday I posted the ChatGPT explainer for blogrolls, but realized later there was an important use of blogrolls it didn't mention. I kept a blogroll on my home page because those were the sites I wanted to check regularly to see what's new. So I was thinking about my own use of my blog, not just helping out sites I support or giving ideas to people who read my blog. Also they didn't provide an illustration of what a blogroll looks like. Here's a snapshot from August 2000, and sure enough, in the left margin, there's the blogroll. Here's a screen shot.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:49:08 GMT

A snapshot from May 2003. The template was redesigned, and there are changes to what's in the blogroll, but it's still there, in the same place.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:54:09 GMT

By August 2004, the blogroll is gone. I don't remember why I took it down, probably because I wasn't using it very much, because by then we had feeds, and Radio UserLand (a feed reader and blogging tool) and the blogroll was just a list, and didn't have any way of telling me in advance that a site had updated.

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:45:55 GMT

All of a sudden my posts on Mastodon are getting liked and forwarded a lot more than on the other platforms. What changed? Hmm.

Beatles

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 21:08:23 GMT

My #1 Beatles song these days is Day Tripper.

Most of my listening has been to John Lennon, and more reading.

A lot of his lyrics intentionally mean nothing.

My current infatuation is Gimme Some Truth from Imagine is pretty great because the lyrics are super clear, and quite forceful and beautiful. Of course we want the truth, some of us at least, and you can't tiptoe around that. Most people have arranged their lives so they avoid the truth at all costs. In the end the truth prevails for everyone no matter how hard you try.

Then I saw a quick interview with Ringo and Paul, current day, and Ringo is being kind of a bitch saying that Paul was a workaholic, and he's standing right there, but he isn't disagreeing in fact he's nodding his head, basically saying he likes to do things.

I always wish as a child of their breakup that they had found a way to work together, and for John and George to have their independence from Paul. He definitely took the brunt, but it looks to me like he was desperate to keep the Beatles from breaking up and that brought out his powerful control freak side.

Thing is to people my age, these were our uncles. But maybe there was nothing after The End? Maybe they really were done. We like to believe there was more, but maybe there wasn't.

And of course the people who were Beatles were just people, strangers to us really, we were just projecting our dreams on them. Until the Get Back show, which answered so many of our questions were answered and got us thinking and dreaming again.

Peter Jackson changed the world of 20s as much imho as the Beatles did in the 60s. He did a great thing.

Journalism isn't responsible

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 17:47:49 GMT

There is no organized oversight of journalism. No one whose criticism they respect. And they don't criticize themselves. It's a monopoly, with no reason to change, and that's a formula for a festering mess. Their sense of entitlement is legendary. Such chutzpah. Until it shakes up, we're going to keep getting Trump-size debacles.

They could easily blame their employers for creating Trump. If it weren't for his reality show would his followers see him as anything other than a pathetic East Coast blowhard with a bad combover. Instead they blamed Facebook. Not that FB didn't profit enormously from Trump, but you just can't see the role journalism plays because they can't bite the hand that feeds them. But we can. I don't owe them anything, do you?

BTW it would be incredible to see an investigative report of how the But Her Emails meme was birthed? What does it say about cynicism about the press. Did any journalists hear it? Do any of them feel it?

We feel this. Was journalism paying attention?

What is a blogroll?

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 17:41:19 GMT

I asked ChatGPT to explain.

A blogroll is a list of links to other blogs or websites that a blogger enjoys or finds relevant. It's often found in the sidebar of a blog. The purpose of a blogroll is to share recommendations with readers and to connect with the broader blogging community. By including a blogroll, a blogger can provide their audience with access to additional resources, opinions, or communities that share similar interests. It can also serve as a tool for networking and building relationships with other bloggers, through mutual linking or acknowledgment. Blogrolls were more prominent in the early days of blogging but can still be found on many sites today.

I couldn't improve on that, so I published it as-is.

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 20:39:44 GMT

I thought ChatGPT could make a movie for me, so I sketched one out. "I'd like a video showing a middle-aged man skiing down an intermediate slope, looking excellent and confident. It's sunny and there are bumps on the hill, and a few other skiers on the side of the slope with expressions of astonishment that such an old person can be such a snazzy skier." Instead of making the video for me, it wrote a creative plan for me. That wasn't what I had in mind! 😄

Skiing is falling

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 19:40:50 GMT

I went skiing again today, second time in two weeks. Feeling pretty good. And I learned something I'd like to share. A different way of looking at skiing. Here's the story...

First thing in the morning the snow was hard and while they had done a good job of grooming, you do a lot of sliding when you edge when the snow is so hard. Much more than in the powder you get in the Rockies. So I'm always totally thinking about staying in control and it's stressful. In this mode I ask myself why I'm doing this if it's so unpleasant.

But as the snow softened during the day, and my body warmed up, and my brain remembered more about this strange thing that I used to do so well, I started going faster, not worrying as much, and then started going faster, and I started feeling like wow I'm doing this well, and then boom, for an instant I completely lost control and was tilted one way, but had to land the other way, and without any conscious thought and absolutely no time to worry, my brain and body did exactly what you have to do to make this look and feel super elegant, almost as if I must have planned it this way.

I kept skiing a bit after that and then stopped and breathed the cold air, and looked at another ski area far in the distance (Hunter?) and realized something -- skiing is falling. You go to a mountain top, pull down your goggles, get to the top of some steepness, and you jump. The question is -- do you look and feel beautiful while doing it, or are you scared and trying to stay in control. But that's the thing, falling is all about letting it go and trusting your mind and body will know what to do when you fall one way, and also when you fall another.

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 15:11:21 GMT

I've taken to cross-posting to various social media accounts, by opening a new window, creating the post in one service's little text box, and then opening tabs for each of the others and copy-pasting. Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Facebook. I'm getting good at it. Yesterday I did that with the piece about President Biden and how he probably would rather be doing anything than be President, for a mostly thankless country, at age 81. I imagine he has great-grandchildren he'd like to get to know. Maybe a book or two to read, maybe one to write. To get his affairs in order. At age 68 I'm trying to shed responsibility as much as possible. It's prudent, and has a point. When I was 25 I wanted to take over the world. Now I'd just like to feel good. As you get older you are capable of more depth of feeling, in some ways, and grow more numb in others. I spent time with my father at 80, his last year. He was always a curious man, wanting to learn about anything new, but in his last days he wasn't curious. No ambition. But he seemed okay with it, even happy at times (possibly due in part to the morphine he was allowed). Anyway, it's always interesting to see where people react to what among the different social web networks. And in this case, the most flow came from Mastodon, by far. I would not have predicted that. And it's good to see, that interesting ideas and perspective may have more of a future outside the networks operated by the billionaire tech companies.

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:36:51 GMT

The News tab on the Scripting News home page was set up to request the All category from my FeedLand account. I switched to Tech, it's a bit faster, and probably a better fit. Still looking for a performance issue.

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:47:21 GMT

If you're thinking it might be good if President Biden stepped aside for someone younger and nicer to look at, what you really want is President Biden to be younger and nicer looking, and of course he probably wouldn't mind that either. But, as Keith Olbermann spells out so well in his latest Countdown, if he were to step aside that would basically concede the election to Trump. So if you think the old man is being silly and vain, well, he's being a lot smarter than you are, and btw, paying a huge price. If you live to be 81, I bet the last thing you want to do, after the life he's had, is to be in this position. We should get behind him, and tell him so, let him know we don't want anyone else, and we want him to be happy, healthy and know that the smart, good people of the US appreciate what he's doing for all of us.

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 16:48:15 GMT

I was happy to see Jon Stewart back on the Daily Show. I wish he would get over how he looks, all of us have aged in the time since he was last on the Daily Show. It was really good. He finally is back with the writers he belongs with, and this show obviously agrees with him, and I got the feeling I always used to get from his show "we'll figure this out."

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 14:18:25 GMT

The next hurdle for AI is to teach the software to learn about you. I think that's what we all want. Start with the simplest things. This is my coding style, so give me all the example code you generate this way. Where does this end? No idea. But read Klara and the Sun, a truly great story, beautifully told, for a truly creative application.

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 14:24:20 GMT

This is what I imagine we all yearn for, for someone to really know us before we die. Okay if it can't be other people, at least let it be a machine. Something like preserving a brain. Wouldn't it be great to know that when you're gone, the essential you, even if it doesn't include your consciousness, persists? You could visit a person like you visit a website. This is just evolutionary, and it's obviously going to happen.

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 14:15:46 GMT

Today would be the perfect day to ski at Belleayre or Hunter, if you can get out of NYC where all the snow is falling. I have work to do and was planning on skiing tomorrow, expecting 8 inches of fresh snow. We're not getting much from this storm in the Catskills, NYC is getting the brunt. And any day you can't get here from the city means not many people on the mountain. 😄

A powerful blogroll!

Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:04:50 GMT

I'd like a fanciful cartoon drawing of a blogroll that automatically sorts itself out when something new comes in. It's happy and fun but also very powerful!

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:50:40 GMT

The best SuperBowl ad according to my stringent quality standards was Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, proving that comedy isn't hard, just have people reacting to stupid stuff in ridiculous self-destructive ways. Physical comedy for some reasons is ROTFL funny. They can do this because everyone knows and loves their delicious product and while it isn't good for you, it won't kill you either. And the announcer is Bojack Horseman, so you know that's pretty cool too.

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:17:24 GMT

Big snowstorm coming in tonight. And working on some interesting new software. That's about all for now.

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:49:49 GMT

The SuperBowl last night was an excellent sports game. I didn't like all the bullshit, but it was good sport. However it's all about gambling. I bet it's ruining a lot of lives. A way of sucking the last pennies from people who are already struggling. And it's so easy, just get an app for your phone, add your credit card, and give them all your money.

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 19:49:02 GMT

The Niners didn't win but Taylor Swift did, that's good enough for me.

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:42:35 GMT

There's a chain of beating hearts connecting back in time from you to a fish that crawled onto land, one of your many ancestors (assuming you believe in evolution, I guess). Actually, even if you don't believe. 😄

Just give me some truth

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 23:32:55 GMT

I just found myself writing in a tweet on Threads that the news industry has contempt for its readers that AI tools don't have.

Actually the AIs also have a way better attitude about the truth than Wikipedia does (yes I know Wikipedia is a Ouija board, that the very worst people control).

We weren't worried about the rise of fascism and the destruction of our ecology, but we were worried about preserving jobs for supposed truth-tellers who think we deserve garbage and don't disappoint.

For ten points, who was the Tricky Dicky he was singing about?

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 02:51:25 GMT

I'm almost rooting for KC just so Taylor can be the total dominant uncontested Queen of America.

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 20:33:54 GMT

If the Supreme Court had an ounce of guts they would say this isn't a state matter, it's a federal matter, and we are the federal government, so here's the deal. Trump tried to overthrow the government and he took an oath to protect the government, and therefore the 14th Amendment applies, and he can't be on the ballot anywhere, including Colorado.

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 16:38:33 GMT

Where did RSS being D come from? The meme was started by VCs and tech influencers in the 00s. A bunch of VCs had RSS startups, hired people who didn't know anything about it to run the companies.